


this beautiful boy

by screamlet



Category: Kill Your Darlings (2013)
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was something to be said about keeping oneself distant from one’s friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this beautiful boy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zlot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zlot/gifts), [bogged](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bogged/gifts).



There was something to be said about keeping oneself distant from one’s friends.

It was how he got to New York in the first place.

“I’ll buy a car,” Bill said to David. “I’ll buy a car, we’ll take turns driving to New York.”

“Lou,” David said, motioning to the blond who had been silently chainsmoking during the conversation. “He’s going out there with his mother, but we’ll meet him there when she’s gone.”

“Give us your address,” Bill said as he pulled out a small notebook. “Number, too. We’ll meet up and drink to freedom in the priciest toilet in the world.”

Lou cracked a smile then, held the cigarette between his lips, and obliged Bill with the great favor of his address in New York.

“What will you do in New York?” Lou asked as he passed the notebook and pen back to Bill.

Bill said nothing. He thought nothing, he did nothing—he breathed, probably, maybe blinked, but he had no response to that. He needed something to do in New York? _Something_? Something that he could only do specifically in New York and nowhere else? Fuck that.

So Bill shrugged and dug in his pockets for another cigarette. 

*

“Same kid from St. Louis,” Bill sighed as he drove. “Jesus, Dave. Why?”

“Why have you only got nine and a half fingers?”

“Fuck you, that’s why.”

“That’s Lou.”

“That’s the worst,” Bill said. “And I should know, because garden shearing my pinky off? Was the worst. Get away from that kid, walk away with all your fingers.”

Bill glanced over as David lifted both his hands to put them on the dashboard, all ten reflected in the windshield. “They’re here but they’re not, Bill. He’s had them for a while.”

Even for him, the conversation was morbid as shit with a sickening turn to the metaphorical, so Bill dropped it. Each man must fuck up his own life, and at least they had that belief in common. 

*

Bill didn’t want friends.

“So we’re done?” David asked.

“You’re grandfathered in,” Bill said. “Lou, too, I guess, since you tell him everything.” Bill watched as David thought about it, like he was going to protest, but he didn’t. Of course he told Lou everything. There were at least ten thousand things wrong with Lou so of course he was the one in charge of all their secrets. Good choices, that.

No, but that was the _point_ , to make the bad-wrong-crazy-irresponsible-drunk-drugged-nonsensical-selfish choices—so why did it feel so terrible to let this little pale leech hang around them and never suck on anything useful? That little bedbug would get them in trouble, real trouble, _you’re no son of mine_ trouble, and Bill Sr. would never come find him again. He’d never drive up in the longest car a city could give him and yank Bill out of boarding school, reformatory, a holding cell, a drunk tank, a bar, that other bar, that gay bar, that lesbian bar, that Paris bar, that boy’s bed, that man’s bed—

No one would save him and he would have to figure out a way to save himself and he’d do it. _Fuck us, Lucien_ , Bill thought to himself as he watched Lou and David sit on David’s couch together. They sat so close, like it was the 1800s and he was watching a pair of grandparents recall how they used to court each other, how long it took them before they could sit close enough together to let their thighs touch through all those clothes. God, who did they think was watching them? _Him_? He was high as he was low, drifting into that drugged sleep where he would leave his body and come back to it with a brand new energy that actually made him feel like living. Lou lifted his hand to stroke David’s cheek, that beard he’d grown to fit in with the other New Yorkers they’d met, _Artists_ all of them, _Bearded_ too, _Cunts_ through and through. 

David turned his head to kiss the palm of Lou’s hand and Bill returned to his body, his body thinking, _hmmmm this could get interesting_. 

“Lou,” Bill interrupted. “Were you waiting for him to put a ring on that finger? Because I think you’ve had him for a long, long time now.”

Without turning away from David, still stroking his cheek, Lou asked, “If we leave to fuck in the other room, you won’t choke on your tongue, will you?”

“It’ll be hanging out and wagging, ever the submissive, helpful dog that I am,” Bill replied.

Lou turned around then, eyebrow raised, like Bill had said something funny. 

 _Oh_ , Bill thought. That was why David was here. That was why they’d bought a car, crashed it somewhere in North Jersey, and walked over the George Washington on foot like idiots. That was why David bullshit his way through two teaching jobs, why David had put down his pen on the coffee table and lifted his chin, the better to let Lou touch his jaw, his neck, open his collar and let pale fingers in. Something about Lou’s look, like all the lights in a city coming on after a blackout—darkness, then all at once. Lifeless without the light, without the radio, and then suddenly a city again. 

“David,” Lou asked, turning back and pressing his mouth against the base of David’s neck. “Can Bill watch? Would you mind it, though? Just think of him there, in that chair by the foot of your bed, watching you take it from me.”

Bless his terrible education. Bill sobered up a little at the thought of watching Lou fuck someone/something/anything and whether _watching you take it from me_ was active or passive— _you_ was David, but would David be fucked and _taking it_ from Lou, or would he fuck Lou and take something more ephemeral from Lou?

Lou’s hand slipped down to undo David’s fly and Bill thought there was nothing ephemeral about this kid, not even close, so Bill stood up and leaned against the wall by the bookshelf, waiting to be taken, too.

*

At the 600th night out to a bar somewhere in New York or the tri-state area, David went to get a round. Lou switched sides and slid into the chair next to Bill. He leaned in close, too close for public, too close for a city that still arrested people for public indecency or whatever they called getting a friend off in a dirty bar stall. 

“Why don’t you like me?” Lou asked.

“You’re a toxic little shit who’s going to ruin David’s life,” Bill said. “That aside, I like you plenty.”

“You like me _plenty_?” Lou asked. “I thought you wanted to be a _writer_.”

“I bet you say that to all of David’s pretentious friends who can bankroll your imported cigarette life,” Bill said.

Lou looked haughty and offended. Bill would have grinned into his drink if David ever came back with one. 

“Don’t you all want to be writers?” Lou asked.

“Don’t _you_?” Bill asked. “Of course I want to write. Of course we _all_ want to write. What’s the alternative? Back to St. Louis, slowly working my way into the corner office? Someone named Myrtle hanging off my arm at parties and _occasionally_ letting me stick it in her ass? Better to say, _yes, I want to be a writer_ , and avoid all…” Bill leaned on his elbow and made a futile gesture to encapsulate… “ _That_.”

“That’s… very vivid,” Lou said.

“How about you?” Bill asked. “You write? Want to write? Think about writing?”

“I haven’t written an essay for school since I met David,” Lou said.

“Well, that’s good,” Bill said. “He’s good to free you up so you can keep being our social director here.”

Every time a jab landed, Lou made a shocked little _oh_ face and it was _fantastic_. He could feel his toes curling with pleasure at being able to ram something into this idiot’s face and get a reaction when even his little pale shoulders curled in on themselves to make sure no one even looked at him that he wasn’t letting look. 

As David returned with their drinks, Bill thought that someone had commodified Lou's little body long ago, and that’s who he was now. David handed Bill his whiskey and Lou his vodka on vodka with vodka (twist of lime), his eyes fixed on Lou. Lou finally got up and went back to David’s side of the table, leaning against him. As much as he could in public, anyway. Every look, flutter of his lashes, swollen with biting bottom lip, flush on his cheeks, bare wrists sticking out of his cuffs—every _look_ , deep and soulful, provided Lou with a return, something he could keep for himself. Sometimes it was a night out with other people buying, sometimes it was term papers, other times it was the privilege of being kept around by men 11 and 14 years his senior like they were all good friends. 

*

 _Benzedrine and tea and you and me_. Bill sat against his usual wall in David’s living room and stared at those buzzed little boys, Lou and his new friend with the sweaters and curls. He felt the buzz, too, but he wanted to watch them rather than act. He wanted to sit against the wall and let everything shake through him, starting in his heart and working out to his fingers, calves, toes, his neck, the tips of his ears, the strand of hair that dangled into his eyes when he did something to dislodge it.

He wanted to watch them move around each other. He did. He watched their hands shake and rattle their cups and saucers. They talked and talked, talked fast and talked a great deal, high as _fuck_ as they were. They took to David’s books, first to peruse them, then the merkin in a sweater ripped a page accidentally, cried for a moment because the rip was so perfect, and then they started tearing shit up and nailing it into David’s wall.

Where did they even get the nails?

Bill could hear them repeating to themselves, _IT’S OUR NEW VISION!_ every time they found a new passage to pin up, but he knew it wasn’t about the words. It was the body, the hammer and nail. It was the way their hands brushed against each other as they grabbed for another nail, the way their fingers tangled up in each other accidentally then deliberately, and the way they would pound those nails into the wall with incredible gusto, incredible joy. Why shouldn’t they? Cause and effect: get a nail, hammer it in, progress is made. That is one more nail in one more wall, one more object pinned beneath a glance, one more piece to a work that existed where there was none before.

Then David showed up and David let him sleep against the wall while he bitched the children out, because David was his friend and they weren’t actually anyone’s children.

*

He couldn’t bear to tell David that Lucien Carr had always been like this.

The worst thing for someone like David, someone who went into shit with his whole heart, his whole self, his ten perfect fingers, his beautiful eyes, a mouth any guy would kill for—

The worst thing was to tell David that the person he believed in, the person he looked to, the one who was _his person_ , the person who was his whole life, this beautiful boy who was his fucktoy and his art, who was like drugs were to Bill—like his first joint and his terrible mattress with the comical one spring sticking out of a corner and his first boarding school fuck and his first girl and the guy he had just picked up last week—this person who David had measured his whole life by, was not good. Even by Bill's skewed to-the-terrible standards, this boy was  _not good_.

Bill followed David out of the bar after Lucien’s last little scene. He would take David home, put him to bed, then he’d go home, too. He’d take something and go to bed, even if it was only like five o’clock. He’d lie in bed and watch the ceiling and wait for sleep. He’d wake up tomorrow and keep waiting, waiting for the next thing, because it was bound to come for him soon.


End file.
